By CRAIG FREILICH

CANTON – The owner of O’Leary Funeral Service hopes his current facility will be converted into a professional building or apartments once the funeral home moves.

By mid-June, McCarthy's Restaurant on US 11 south of the village, a favored family eating place for decades, will open as the new location of the O'Leary Funeral Service, now at 32 Park St. downtown.

“We’ve been looking for another location for three, four, five years,” said O’Leary’s owner Joseph White. He hopes to sell the present location.

He said there are several reasons why the out-of-town spot will be better.

“It has better traffic flow, and much more parking than on Park Street,” White said. “We’ll be able to have all of our business on one floor,” he said, noting that at the moment, their showroom is in a garage at 32 Park.

“Parking is the big thing. Park Street is a zoo, and there’s no parking lot here. At McCarthy’s, we’ll be able to handle 60 or 70 cars like nothing.”

And the Rt. 11 location will be spacious by comparison.

“Right now we can accommodate 55 people in the main room,” White said, and in the new spot they will be able to have “110 to 115 people in each chapel,” and there will be two of them.

“We can have two services at the same time,” he said.

White, a Russell native, has been with the O’Leary’s since 1977. He said there are no immediate plans to add to the current staff of four including himself.